Interview with Nick Wiswell, Audio director of Turn 10 Part 2

David Nichols, of the Track Time Audio blog, has posted a second part of his interview with Nick Wiswell, the Audio Director at Turn 10 and audio overseer of the Forza Motorsport games. In this part, Nick discusses how his team used FMOD to implement the audio, how they sourced rarer vehicles, the complexity of Racing audio, and working with Lance Hayes on the UI sounds and music to create the atmosphere the team was looking for. The full interview can be read here, and you can view part one of this great interview here

TTA: Racing game audio is, as I understand it, very unique in the video game world (much like the racing genre is rather unique). It seems like it takes the right kind of person who’s really into cars to produce a great racing game. Do you feel this is the same way for racing audio? Are there particular challenges unique to racing games compared to other genres (technically and/or creatively)?

NW: Creating audio for racing games has a very different set of challenges to creating audio in most other types of games.

Most games require lots of one shot sounds for things like character movement, footsteps, weapons, VO, world objects and object interactions etc. with a small number of constant sounds for moving objects, vehicles or background ambience.

With a racing game most of the objects in the game and making sounds created from many layers of continuously changing sounds.